The Foundation Series: Part 1

Let’s assume we’ve all made it into 2009 in one form or another, some of us maybe showing the scars of recent beatings on the stock market, some of us frantically searching for a flashlight in the face of dark uncertainty on the road ahead. There’s no need to crawl away into the woods, though. We know some things to be true in the coming days – Obama will be marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, auto workers will be down to their last fingernail, bailouts will try to white wash Wall Street, and people, otherwise known as customers, will still be searching for what they require. Yes it’s true, no matter what the brand of uncertainty is on the street, business will still go on – but here’s the catch – in the year ahead, all of us will have to be better at what we do to make the same buck we made two years ago. And that’s why we need to re-engage with the basics of Search Engine Optimization, to make sure we are standing on firm foundations before we reach.

Boiled down to its essence, SEO enables a higher degree of probability that the right eyeballs will land on your website. We know that the average person comes to the Internet looking for some thing (substitute thing for information/service/product/item), and we know that this seeker tends to employ a search engine to find what they are looking for. In this world of attention deficit epidemics, if your website is visible, that is to say ranked on the first three pages of search results returned by the web browser, then there is a significant chance that the seeker will grant you a limited time only audience. At this point, the rest is up to you – if your site is a jumbled mess, the fifteen seconds of seeker attention will pass like lightening and you’ll be left to wither in the cache.

The important part of this web-enabled capitalist-driven equation is the trapping of search engine traffic. Here be the pearls of wisdom – search engine traffic is so valued because it is highly targeted, in other words, the seekers already have an eye for what you are selling. Let’s jump to a real world example. You own a sporting goods store. Two customers come through the door at the same time – you’ve got your displays ready, the sales staff is pumped one customer is wearing aT-shirt that reads “I’m looking for a $200.00 Sidney Crosby composite hockey stick”, the other customer is wearing a T-shirt that reads, “I’m just killing time while my wife cleans out our credit cards”. Take a wild guess as to which customer is going to garner your attention.

Imagine how much easier business could be if life were like this example; imagine how this insight into potential customers would be like a polio shot for crippled retailers. These are the magic moments behind Search Engine Optimization – targeted marketing.